The business practices of redlining,
mortgage discrimination, and
racially-restrictive covenants accelerated
white flight to the suburbs. The denying of banking and insurance
and other social services or the exorbitant prices of said services
increased their cost to residents in predominantly non-white
suburbs and city neighborhoods. Furthermore, the historical
processes of suburbanization and
urban decentralization are instances of white privilege contributing to contemporary
environmental racism.

White flight in the U.S.

White flight has occurred, and occurs, in most every U.S. city,
begun consequent to the post–World War II baby and economic booms. That
explosive, suburban population growth, and racially integrated city
populations were made feasible by the building of highway roads and
suburban parkways bypassing non-white neighborhoods to reduce
travel time between town and the country. Hence, the great
populations that moved from the Bronx and Brooklyn for the
suburbs; likewise in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston.

History

After World War II, to avoid racial integration and cohabiting with
Black Americans, many White Americans began fleeing the cities to
racially-restricted new suburbs. In the
cities, the housing shortages consequent to the influx of rural
black workers for war-effort employment were aggravated by existing
socio-economic inequalities and the automobile. Those social
conditions propitiated white flight from town to country, which
they believed was a better residence than the city. A condition
moreover guaranteed via exclusionary covenants in
title deeds and real estate neighborhood redlining — explicit,
legal racism and discriminatory lending–selling practices; thus
Black Americans were economically disbarred from pursuing the
American Dream in the suburbs, even
when they could afford it. Suburban expansion was mostly available
to middle-class and working-class white people, and facilitated by
their increased wages and federally-guaranteed mortgages (VA, FHA,
HOLC) available only for white people to buy new houses, not rent
apartments. "Racial" Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual,
1938

Recommended restrictions should include provisions for:
prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the
race for which they are intended . . . Schools should be
appropriate to the needs of the new community, and they should not
be attended in large numbers by inharmonious racial
groups. Federal
Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and
Valuation Procedure Under Title II of the National Housing Act With
Revisions to February, 1938 (Washington, D.C.), Part II, Section 9,
Rating of Location.

The roads built via the National Interstate and Defense
Highways Act (1956) and its successors, built to transport
suburbanites to their city jobs, much aided white flight, and
proportionately reduced the city’s supporting tax base, thus,
consequently, beginning urban decay. In
some cases, such as in the Southern United States, local
governments used highway road constructions to deliberately divide
and isolate black neighborhoods
from goods and services, often within industrial corridors.
In
Birmingham,
Alabama, the local government used the post–World War II
interstate highway system to perpetuate the racial
residence-boundaries the city established with a 1926 racial zoning
law. Constructing interstate highways through majority-black
neighborhoods eventually reduced the populations to the poorest
proportion of people financially unable to leave their destroyed
community.

Blockbusting

The real estate business practice of
“blockbusting” was a very important means of controlling non-white
migration and aiding white flight for profit. By subterfuge, real
estate agents would facilitate black people buying a house in a
white neighborhood; either buying the house themselves, or via a
white proxy buyer, and then re-selling it over-priced to the black
family. The consequent racist panic among the remaining white
inhabitants (aggravated by real estate agents and the local
newsmedia fear-mongering), would psychologically coerce the
remaining white inhabitants, fearing devalued residential property,
to quickly sell, usually at a loss — a self-fulfilling prophecy
realized when they began selling en masse — thus
generating great sales commissions for the agents. In turn, the
real estate agents would then sell at higher-than-market prices to
the incoming black families, profiting from price arbitrage and the sales commissions from both the
black and white victims of such fraud.
Thereby, the racial composition of a neighborhood populace often
changed completely in a few years.

Urban decay

Urban decay in the
US: the South Bronx, New York City, was exemplar of the
federal and local governments’ abandonment of the cities in the
1970s and 1980s; the Spanish sign reads “FALSE PROMISES”, the
English sign reads “BROKEN PROMISES”.

Urban decay is the sociological process whereby a city, or part of
a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude — depopulation, economic restructuring, abandoned
buildings, high local unemployment,
fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape,
white flight’s draining of a city’s tax base is one cause.

In the 1970s and 1980s, urban decay was associated with Western
cities, especially in North America
and parts of Europe. In that time, major
structural changes in global economies, transportation, and government policy created
the economic, then social, conditions resulting in urban decay.
Urban decay contradicts the urban development of most of Europe and
North America, in countries beyond, urban decay is manifest in the
peripheral slums at the outskirts of a
metropolis, while the city center and the inner city retain high
real estate values and sustain a steadily increasing
population.

North American cities suffered white flight to the suburbs and
exurb commuter towns, which started to reverse in the 1990s, when
the rich suburbanites returned to the city via gentrification of
the decayed urban neighborhoods by over-paying for (and
over-pricing) the real estate and so economically expelling the
original poor inhabitants. Blight is
another characteristic of urban decay — the visual, psychological,
and physical effects of living among empty lots, and buildings and
houses labelled “THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED”. Such desolate
properties are socially dangerous to the community because they
attract criminals and street gangs, thus
contributing to the volume of crime. Urban decay has no single
cause; it results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic
conditions — including the city’s urban
planning decisions, strictly-enforced rent control, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of
neighborhood-excluding freeway roads and rail road
lines,The Power Broker: Robert
Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro, p.522.

The construction of the Gowanus Parkway, laying a concrete slab on
top of lively, bustling Third Avenue, buried the avenue in shadow,
and when the parkway was completed, the avenue was cast forever
into darkness and gloom, and its bustle and life were forever
gone.

Government-aided white flight

The organization of municipal government in the U.S. facilitated
white flight from racially diverse cities by establishing new
municipalities beyond the abandoned city’s jurisdiction to avoid
the legacy costs of maintaining city
infrastructures, instead spending said taxes establishing the
suburban infrastructures. The federal government contributed to
white flight and the early decay of non-white city neighborhoods by
withholding maintenance capital mortgages, thus making it difficult
for the communities to either retain or attract middle-class
residents.

The new suburban communities limited the emigration of poor and
non-white residents from the city with restrictive zoning, thus few lower middle-class people could
afford a house in the suburbs. In the event, many all-white suburbs
were incorporated to the cities they had fled. Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
partially incorporated towns such as Granville,
Wisconsin; the (then) Mayor, Frank P.Zeidler complained about the societal
destructive "Iron Ring" of new municipalities incorporated in the
post–World War II decade. Analogously, semi-rural communities, such as
Oak
Creek, South Milwaukee, and Franklin, formally incorporated as discrete entities, to
escape urban incorporation when Wisconsin state law allowed
Milwaukee’s incorporation of such rural and sub-urban regions, that
did not qualify for discrete incorporation, per the legal
incorporation standards.

Desegregation: public schools and student busing

The post–World War II racial desegregation of U.S. society —
especially of the public schools — catalyzed white flight from the
cities to the suburbs. In 1954, the US Supreme Court ordered the
de jure termination of the “separate, but equal” legal
racism established with the Plessy v.Ferguson (1896) case in the
nineteenth century, thus, with the Brown v.Board of Education (1954)
case, the Supreme Court ordered the racial desegregation of public
schools, because the unequal funding of majority-black and
majority-white public schools ensured that black people received an
inferior public education despite paying taxes for it. In 1971, in
the case of Swann
v.Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Board of Education (1971), the Supreme Court ordered the
forced busing of poor black students to suburban white schools, and
wealthy white students to poor schools in the city. In the case of
Milliken v.Bradley (1974), the
dissenting Justice William
Douglas observed that “the inner core of Detroit is now rather
solidly black; and the blacks, we know, in many instances are
likely to be poorer. . . .” Like-wise, in 1977, the Federal
decision in Penick v.The Columbus Board of
Education (1977) accelerated white flight from Columbus, Ohio.
The racial desegregation of schools and the racial integration of
U.S. society were most opposed by white people whose children
attended private schools, yet, the most vehement opponents of
racial integration were white people whose children attended
private, religious schools.

A secondary, non-geographic consequence, of school desegregation
and busing was cultural white flight: withdrawing white
children from the mixed-race public school system and matriculating
them to private schools unaffected by U.S. federal anti-racist
laws. In 1970, when the
United States District Court for the Central District of
California ordered the Pasadena Unified School
District desegregated, the white-student proportion (54%) of
the schools approximately reflected the school district’s
proportional white populace (53%).

Once the
federally-ordered school desegregation occurred, whites who could
afford private schools withdrew their children from the racially
diverse Pasadena public school system. In result, by 2004,
Pasadena had 63 private schools educating some 33% of
schoolchildren, while white students made up only 16% of the public
school populace. The Pasadena Unified School District
superintendent characterized public schools as “like the bogey-man”
to whites and implemented policies meant to persuade white parents
to matriculate their children to the racially diverse Pasadena
public school district. In the event, white flight rapidly altered
the racial composition of public school systems; upon
desegregation, in Baltimore, Maryland, the Clifton Park Junior High
School had 2,023 white students and 34 black students; 10 years
later, it had 12 white students and 2,037 black students. In
northwest Baltimore, Garrison Junior High School’s student body
declined from 2,504 whites and 12 blacks to 297 whites and 1,263
blacks in that period.

Recent decades

The New York City and Los Angeles metropolises now experience
black flight consequent to the growing
Hispanic and Asian populations settling in traditionally
Black American communities. In 1967, the 12th Street Riot of Detroit, Michigan, contributed to white flight,
leaving contemporary Detroit more than 80 percent black, and most
of its suburbs, including Livonia, Dearborn, and Warren,
predominantly white.

Another
example of "White flight" in the United States took place in
Miami. Indeed, the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 brought 150,000
Cubans (mostly poor "non-white hispanics") to Miami, the largest in
US civilian history. During this time, many of the middle class
non-Hispanic whites in the community left the city. As a
consequence, while in 1960 Miami was 90% non-Hispanic white, by
1990 it was only about 10% non-Hispanic white.

Northern California

Since
1980, in the states west of Texas, San Francisco and Oakland are the only major U.S. cities whose white
populations increased — despite Oakland having the largest Black
populace (30% versus 50% per the 1980 census); thus, after sixty
years of having been a predominantly Black American city, the
gentrification begun in the 1990s
changed the demographic composition of Oakland.Most of the Asian
American populace of the San Francisco bay area live in San Mateo
County, San Jose, Santa Clara, the east Bay, Sonoma, and Napa
Valley, not the city proper. The non-white
proportions — 20 percent black and 40 percent Latino — of the
socially conservative capital
city of Sacramento (38% white) are greater than the comparable
proportions of socially liberal San
Francisco.

Ireland

Non-white
immigration to Ireland at the twentieth century’s end provoked white
flight from Dublin to the
island's interior and peripheral suburbs, which an economist
described as “unprecedented white flight”. In 2006, the
Central Statistic Office forecast that white flight would continue.
Also, international and Irish news media reported an emerging
pattern of indigenous Irish self-segregation centered upon Gaeilge
(Irish language) schools in reaction
against the increased percentages of non-white and foreign
immigrant pupils matriculated to Dublin schools.

The Netherlands

Since
2004, and especially after the Muslim assassination of the artist
Theo van Gogh, many Dutch people are
fleeing the
Netherlands, and
emigrating to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Aggravating the high-population density stresses, the rise of
inter-ethnic violence and crime between the indigenous Dutch people
and non-white immigrants are cited as motives for white
flight.

New Zealand

From the
1950s to the 1970s, white flight in areas of New Zealand was a gradual reaction to the mass urbanization of
Māori natives and Pacific island guest
workers.In Auckland, white flight mostly has reversed since the 1980s,
with European New Zealanders
residing in neighborhoods that previously had non-white (Māori and
Pacific Islander) populaces such as Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, and
Kingsland. Contemporarily, those previously non-white city
neighborhoods and the CBD are amongst the most expensive, desirable
real estate in Auckland and New Zealand. Similar gentrification has occurred in Wellington inner city neighborhoods of Thorndon, Newtown, and
Aro Valley.

United Kingdom

Trevor Phillips, head of the UK
Commission
for Equalities and Human Rights, and Mike Poulsen, an
Australian academic, have claimed that White Britons and non-white Britons are
becoming more segregated, however, researchers Ceri Peach, Danny
Dorling, and Ludi Simpson have argued that segregation in the UK is
either stable or declining. Demographic data indicate trends of
simultaneous ethnic minority dispersal and segregation. In the
1980s and 1990s, ethnic minority populations increased in both
white-majority suburbs and towns and the inner city districts of first immigrant
settlement. In areas such as Newham and Brent, White Britons have become a minority, though they
remain the single largest ethnic group. Unlike in the US,
all major UK cities have white majority populaces. Researcher Ludi
Simpson says that the growth of ethnic minorities in Britain is due
mostly to natural population growth (births outnumber deaths)
rather than immigration, and that both white and non-white Britons
are equally likely to leave mixed-race inner city areas. In his
opinion, these trends indicate counter urbanization rather than white
flight.